Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration by Adriana Craciun (review)

Arctic histories of Britain and North America traditionally celebrated white male endeavors, dwelling on narratives of quest, disaster, heroic suffering, and occasional triumph. Feminist and postcolonial critiques in recent years have turned this tradition on its head, exposing the ambition and much of the absurdity of imperialist designs on the Arctic. While reversing the moral equations of earlier narratives, these newer critiques can too easily reproduce the sensationalism of earlier accounts as well as produce simplifications of their own. A growing body of work, however, by such scholars as Michael Bravo, Russell A. Potter, and Janice Cavell, is carving a new path. Their complex cultural analyses, environmental awareness, and attention to indigenous perspectives have injected a much-needed sophistication into polar scholarship, and, in so doing, they demonstrate that global historians cannot afford to ignore regions long regarded as marginal in every sense of the word.

Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration is an outstanding contribution to this new scholarship. In it, Adriana Craciun sets out to show that the linking of the Arctic with disaster in the cultural imagination was a product of the Victorian age. Previous scholars have shown the ways in which the literary and visual cultures of the nineteenth century created images of the Arctic as empty, blank, and timeless, a dazzling and disorienting place of sublime icescapes and polar wastes. Craciun's concern is neither to replicate such scholarship nor to reinstate a more diverse and dynamic Arctic history, but rather to "dismantle the critical mechanisms that allow this temporally, spatially, and discipline-specific discourse to continue to stand in for British perceptions and experiences of the Arctic as a whole" (9).

Craciun argues that nineteenth-century print and material cultures combined to produce the narrative of heroic, nationalist exploration through a perilous void that still shapes popular Anglo-American understandings of the Arctic today. The publication culture of the early nineteenth century, in particular, created the explorer as hero. When the most famous of those explorers, John Franklin, disappeared into the Arctic, his failure spread a romantic glamor over the relics of death and destruction left by his expedition. Zealous collection and display of those relics both stimulated and were enabled by popular enthusiasm for the visual and exhibitionary cultures of the late Victorian age. The new narrative drew a revised version of history into its service, radically simplifying the complexity of past encounters in the process.

At the center of Craciun's project lies the disaster that became the focus of so much Victorian cultural imagining: the loss of Franklin's 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, and the multiple searches that followed for the missing ships, Erebus and Terror. Two centuries of effort, Craciun argues, have consolidated the "gravitational pull" of this disaster, and shaped our assumptions of what constitutes Arctic exploration (2). In grappling with these epistemic legacies, the history of publication, authorship, and print culture is as important as that of the shifting scientific and geographical understandings of the natural world. Craciun suggests that an effective alliance between the Admiralty and the eminent Tory publisher John Murray stimulated a popular rage for Arctic exploration narratives and produced the figure of the explorer as author: individual, authoritative, and heroic. Franklin's first Arctic debacle—his disastrous command of an overland expedition in which he lost most of his men—made him one of the most recognized and paradoxically admired of these figures. In a superb and subtle analysis of the relationship between print and material culture, Craciun reveals the ways in which the mania for collection and display of relics and debris from his last expedition cemented popular enthusiasm for the idea of the Arctic as a place of disaster.

The book follows a recursive, rather than a progressive, chronology, digging ever deeper into the past to expose the effortful reconstructions of later historians. Where Victorian narratives of heroic quest...